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How-To Geek

If you’ve ever wished you could see your Android phone’s screen on your desktop or remote control it using your mouse and keyboard we’ll show you how in this simple guide to gaining remote access to your Android device.

Why would you want to gain access? When you’re done with this tutorial you’ll be able to view your phone’s screen on your computer monitor which is great for: putting your Android notifications right along side other notification boxes on your monitor, using it like an on-monitor caller ID, and taking screenshots and screencasts. Also if your phone is rooted (and it should be! rooting unlocks so many great features) you’ll gain the ability to use your computer’s keyboard and mouse to control your Android phone. Remote keyboard/mouse control is great for inputting data on the tiny screen without needing to peck at the on-screen keyboard.

Convinced? Great! Let’s get started.

What You’ll Need

For this trick you’ll need a few things, all of them free (sans your not-free-as-in-beer Android device). Gather up the following items:

Configuring the Android SDK

For this tutorial we’ll be using a Windows 7 machine but since there is an SDK pack for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and the secret sauce in our tutorial is a Java app, you should have no problem following along regardless of your OS.

The first thing we need to do is configure the Android SDK. There is a Windows installer, we recommend skipping it. There is no need to install the SDK pack and all the extra stuff it wants you to install unless you’re planning on doing Android development (and if you are, you likely already having it installed anyway).

Download the archive and extract the android-sdk-windows folder. Open the folder. Click on the SDK Manager.exe. We have to do a little updating as the new versions of the SDK pack don’t come with some of the auxiliary apps we need. When you run the SDK Manager several windows will open rapidly and look like this:

Take a moment to uncheck everything but the top entry, Android SDK Platform-Tools. We need the tools but we don’t need any of the other SDK development packs (failing to uncheck them means you’ll have to sit through a lengthy download and waste disk space with development images you won’t need). Once the download is complete you can close the SDK Manager.

Checking the Connection Between Your PC and Android Device

At this point you’ll want to connect your Android device via the USB sync cable. Double check your android-sdk-windows directory and make sure you see a folder labeled platform-tools (if you do not, run the SDK manager again and double check that the Android SDK Platform-tools downloaded properly).

Open the directory, inside should be an application named adb.exe. Open a command prompt and drag and drop adb.exe onto it. Type devices as a command switch after the adb.exe, as seen in the screen shot below:

One of two things will happen: one, you’ll get a list of attached devices (as seen above) or two, adb will search for and connect any Android devices it finds. 99% of the errors you’ll run into when linking your device to your computer can be resolved by simply running adb.exe devices when the device is properly connected.

Linking Your PC and Android Device via AndroidScreencast

Grab that copy of androidscreencast.jnlp you saved earlier and copy it to your android-sdk-windows folder. It doesn’t have to be in the same directory but you might as well keep things tidy. Double click on the file and you’ll see a Java loading screen like the one in the screenshot above. The first run usually takes longer than usual so be patient, also if you run into any errors go back and double check that adb.exe devices actually shows your Android device on the device list. Once it is done loading you should see your Android’s screen:

At this point non-rooted phones can see the screen, snap a screenshot using third party tools (there is, sadly, no built in screenshot tool) or can record video of the screen using the built-in screencasting tools. If you have a rooted device not only can you see the screen but you can also interact with it both by clicking directly on the screen and by clicking the function buttons along the bottom of the viewer (home, menu, back, and so on). Both rooted and non-rooted users can use the basic file browser to but for most purposes it is fairly limited and doesn’t add any value to the whole remote view/control mission.

Anytime you want to remotely view or control your device in the future, simply tether it with the USB cable and run androidscreencast.jnlp.

Have an Android hack to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments. Want to know how to do something on your Android phone? We want to hear about that too.

Jason Fitzpatrick is a warranty-voiding DIYer who spends his days cracking opening cases and wrestling with code so you don't have to. If it can be modded, optimized, repurposed, or torn apart for fun he's interested (and probably already at the workbench taking it apart). You can follow him on Twitter if you'd like.

Easiest way is over wifi. I do it all the time. With my Captivate I use droid VNC server. It’s free in the market. And on my pc I use tightVNC. Start droid VNC server, it’ll give you an ip address on your phone with a port number. Start tightVNC on your pc and put in that ip address and port and bingo you have remote control of your android device over wifi.

This is HTC’s software to sync various stuff from your phone to your PC, such as email, bookmarks etc. However, even if you don’t need that stuff, HTC Sync has a bunch of USB drivers for your phone, and that’s what we *do* need.

I got the explorer work and I can view the phone screen. However I was not able control the phone on my computer. Is there any way to turn on the control mode? I tried in both windows and ubuntu and neither works

Hey, some reason i set my htc desire using my charger cable ( as this is the way to connect it to the computer ) and that devices abd.exe thing doesn’t find my device nor does it come up when i open the java file.

i couldn’t do this .. i had usb debugging and sd card unmounted and no devices were listed .. i tried removing my sd card completely and no results.Running windows 7 with an lg optimus v (rooted) . Any ideas?

I followed this guide on a desktop PC with 64-bit Windows Vista OS and ran into some issues.
AndroidScreencast screen was painfully slow and did not respond to clicking directly on the screen or by clicking the function buttons along the bottom of the viewer (home, menu, back, and so on).
The only functions that worked were right-click, which changed the screen orientation, and Explore, the basic file browser. My phone is a rooted HTC Hero with Android OS 2.1. HTC Sync software has already been installed.

Please advise on how I can gain the full functionality described in this article. Any kind of help would be appreciated.

Hi..
I’m using a Samsung Galaxy 5 – GTI-5500 phone with CyanogenMod 7 [2.3] ROM. I could connect and the phone is recognized and control buttons work.
But my screen is not showing correctly. I see only colorful horizontal lines across the window. And it changes when I change the phone screen.

What could be the reason, I do not see a meaningful screen of the phone on the PC ?

The capabilities of remote control software such as <a href="http://www.proxynetworks.com/products/remote-control-software.html"> http://www.proxynetworks.com/</a> are constantly expanding. The ability to control your desktop from your phone is revolutionary. Similarly, the ability to control your phone from your desktop is extends the software’s versatility.

Shame this wouldn’t work with my Motorola XPRT. USB debugging is off, SD card unmounted but device still can’t be found. Too bad as USB is all I really have and being able to at least see my phone screen larger would have helped.

i dropped my phone and the display is not working anymore, i thought that maybe looking for a software over the internet that would let me see what i cant on my phone would be handy, i installed the installer and the java application but my phone doesn’t show up when i run the command prompt and if the reason is because of the debugging mode then i am lost because i cant see anything to launch that option (actually i can do nothing on it, well i can turn it off and on…that’s it!!xD)…is there a software that does that for me through the computer????…………and for the ones who can’t find a use to this masterful piece of software here’s one ;) LOL.
I hope somebody has any suggestion i need to do this so bad :(

I’m kinda blocked where you have to check the connection. I see a folder named platform tools, but where am I supposed to find adb.exe? and also which directory are you talking about and how do I find it?
Thanks!

Device not showing??
I had this problem. Solution for me was to go to device manager on my PC. My Ideos X5 had an exclamation mark next to it indicating it wasn’t correctly set up. Downloaded the usb drivers for my phone, updated them and problem solved.

I had downloaded this 2 weeks ago and it worked great. I went to use it yesterday and it no longer worked. I saw there was an update so i reinstalled it..and it still doesnt work. The problem is that my Android device isn’t popping up when I search for devices..even though it IS plugged in and I can access it.

I had it working a few times, but now it will no longer work. I get an “Application Error: Unable to launch the application.” OR it does not pick up that the device is connected..even though I have made sure the USB debugging has been checked. I don’t understand why it works sometimes and other times it doesn’t…if I haven’t changed anything?

DID YOU KNOW?

The interrobang (also known as interabang) is a non-standard punctuation mark, ‽, that combines the ? and ! marks to denote excited questioning or disbelief.